GARY McMAHON
illustrated by Jim Burns
As far as I know it was one of the first incursions, those initial incidents that we now realise were merely glimpses of what was soon to come. Back then, of course, we had no idea what it meant. Nobody did. This was before the mass panic, the media blackouts, the riots, and the unstoppable rising of the sea levels. Before things whose names were horror itself started to break through for real and disassemble our world, piece by screaming piece.
This was before all of that; the intimate before the epic.
***
We were on a working holiday, investigating some old cave and tunnel networks found on the island of Menorca. The site was already familiar to us; we’d read about it when the original set of ruins was uncovered back in the mid-nineties. But now we knew that we needed to go there, to see the place for ourselves, because this time what they’d found was older than anything else in the area.
Deep within a small cave system, scrawled on a wall revealed by an inexplicable subterranean rockslide, one of the custodians of the site had discovered some well-preserved etchings. They depicted humanoid figures coming up out of the sea. They weren’t completely human. Their limbs were long and distorted; their faces were stretched; they seemed to rise from the waters like something boneless and unused to moving on dry land.
Tina and I had spent the day looking at the etchings, photographing them, documenting the images so that we could write up a report for the funding bodies. I wasn’t sure about the origin of the cave-markings, but the strata down there was much older than the exposed caves above. Somebody mentioned prehistoric troglodytes and laughed. I didn’t even crack a smile.
We called in using Skype, reporting our findings to the office in London. Brent, our boss, didn’t seem too interested. He was blasé about the work. Years ago he’d been passionate, a real firebrand, but these days he didn’t give a shit about anything but how many days were left until he could cash in his final-salary pension.
We logged off and went to the hotel bar. There were not a lot of people around. Out of season, the island dried up, curled in on itself like a sleeping serpent. The barman was bored. After he’d finished washing glasses that were already clean, he sidled up to us and made small talk. When we told him what we did, why we were here, he perked up a little and bought us drinks.
“It must be interesting,” he said. “Your job. Digging through history like that.” His English was immaculate. He’d told us that he used to live in Essex, but came home when his student loans ran out.
“I suppose it is,” said Tina, the light catching the side of her face and making it glow. She always glowed to me; she was like fire, like naked flame.
“Do you know of the necropolis beach?”
“Which one?”
I sat there and watched Tina as she spoke, enraptured by her casual beauty. I think even then I suspected things were coming to an end.
“Cala Morell. Necropolis caves.”
“Ah, yes. Isn’t it a bit of a tourist trap?”
The barman grinned. “Not that one…the other one. The beach only the locals know. The old beach.” His eyes sparkled. Telling a woman like Tina something she doesn’t know – watching her eyes widen in interest and her lips part with excitement – makes a man feel good.
“There are things that come up out of the water. After dark. These days there are a lot of strange things…weird events that we all take for granted.”
Immediately I thought of the cave etchings, the creatures depicted on the rough rock walls.
“Tell me more.” Tina leaned forward, sipped her white wine.
“A long, long time ago, before people came to this island for holidays, the indigenous Catalans had secrets. Some of those secrets remained hidden. Secrets like sin espinas: the boneless ones. They have returned to the beach. They’ve come home.”
Tina laughed. It was a beautiful sound. I never stopped loving the music of her laughter, the way it bent the air to meet its demands. “Espinas…doesn’t that mean thorns? Like on a rose?”
The barman shrugged. “I’m being serious. Here…” He grabbed a napkin and began to scribble on it with a biro. “This is the way. You can drive only so far, and then you must walk.” He handed her the map.
“Really?” She stared at him. From the angle where I was sitting, I was unable to see her eyes, but I knew the expression on her face well. She would be tearing him down with her gaze, casting upon him the full force of her considerable personality.
“I swear to you,” said the barman, his voice low. “You’ll thank me after you see this. Sin espinas…the ones without bones.”
We didn’t go to the beach that night. Instead we drank too much local Mahon gin and stared into one another’s eyes. The barman soon moved away, sensing that we were sharing something that he could not fathom, no matter how hard he tried. Tina and I stumbled back to our room, where we made love by candlelight. I remember her hands on my skin, the way her eyes reflected the lambent flame; I remember it all, and I treasure the memory.
Afterwards, as we lay holding each other, Tina said “Espinas… You know, I’m pretty sure that’s also something to do with filleting a fish. I remember the phrase, or something like it, from a Spanish cookbook.”
“Does it even matter?” I stroked her arm, enjoying the softness of her skin.
She pulled away. “I don’t know. It might.”
When she fell asleep I sensed a division between us, as if something had cleaved us apart. It confused me, this feeling. I had no idea what had happened to cause such a negative sensation. For months now, we had been drifting apart. It had been a gradual thing: slow, incremental movements rather than major seismic shifts.
I lay awake for a little while, and then the shadows closed in. The last thing I thought about before drifting into them was the image of a fish without bones but with large curved thorns sticking out of its flesh.
The next day we were back on site, cataloguing and documenting, doing our jobs. We uncovered more of the drawings, this time showing the boneless figures raising their floppy arms into the air as if calling down something from above. Peeling back layers of dirt, we saw more and more of these painstakingly scored images. The pictures began to unnerve me. There was something wrong but I couldn’t quite focus in on what it was. Perhaps it had something to do with the unvoiced tension between Tina and me, or maybe it was something in the air – a sense of impending change.
We ate an early dinner in a small hillside restaurant, and then drove back down to the hotel. The barman who’d given us the map wasn’t there. It must have been his night off. We almost didn’t bother going. I tried to convince us both that he’d been trying to impress her, flirting by relating some silly local myth as if it were the truth.
Tina wouldn’t listen. She wanted to go down to the secret beach. “What’s the worst that could happen? There’s nothing there, so we fuck on the sand and come back here for a nightcap.”
She could always convince me to join her on an adventure. I was powerless whenever she spoke to me that way.
We drove down to the coast in our little rental car, following the directions on the sketchy paper-napkin map. I almost missed the turn-off. The road was typically narrow and winding; the trees hung down onto the blacktop near the verge. At the last minute I saw a sign: Cala Morell. I stepped on the brake and managed to turn in. Stopped the car at an angle.
I got out and looked around, moving away from the road that led down to the little cove where the tourists went to look at the burial holes gouged into the cliff face, the ones featured in all the holiday brochures. Just as the barman had said, the alternative route was hard to find; also as he’d said, I did find it eventually. Pulling back some low-hanging branches, I caught sight of a narrow footpath that in reality could barely even be called that. It was merely a line of flattened undergrowth, a casual pathway where feet had trod in the past.
“This way,” I said, turning. But she was already standing right behind me, smiling.
After a few minutes following the dark route, the trees and bushes began to thin out and we saw torchlight up ahead. Several people were making their way down the same rough path. As we neared them, we saw even more up ahead. Tina seemed disappointed but I was glad: I didn’t want us to be the only people down there if anything did come up out of the sea.
We walked hand in hand, part of the crowd: this solemn procession of strangers moving together through the darkness towards a common goal.
The barman had told us that the pathway was two kilometres long from the crude entrance down to the beach. It ran downhill at a steep gradient – which meant the return journey would be tiring – and now that we’d travelled a while and the undergrowth had receded, I could identify that the surface was basically a sandy dirt track set in a cutting between two high cliffs.
Nobody spoke; the silence was respectful, even reverent. It felt as if we were taking part in a holy pilgrimage of some kind.
Tina squeezed my hand, looking for reassurance. I turned my head, surprised at her newfound trepidation, and smiled. She smiled back, but coyly, as if she barely knew me. We carried on down the narrow track, bamboo trees rising up on either side of us. The people with flashlights lit the way for the rest of us. It would have been impossible to drive a vehicle of any kind along this route, even one of the mopeds the islanders favoured. The track was rutted, its surface uneven. I was worried that Tina might slip and fall because she was wearing her cheap flip-flops. I watched the bobbing heads in front of us, the spidery limbs in the futile flash of electric lights that spilled across the landscape. Somebody sneezed. A woman started to say something and then changed her mind.
“This is exciting,” said Tina. “I wonder why this isn’t better known – you’d think it would be mentioned in the guide books or something.”
“Imagine what it would be like with a horde of tourists tramping down this crappy path. Remember what that guy said: the islanders have their secrets.” I shrugged.
“I suppose so,” said Tina. “It’s more exciting this way, too, like we’re all in on something special.” When she smiled light splashed across her face for a moment before jerking off to illuminate something else.
Before long we came to the beach. Virgin sand. A tiny natural bay. Tide-sculpted rocks and two decaying rowing boats tied to the shore with frayed ropes. There was a salty tang of rot in the air. Far up on the cliff faces to the left and right of us, I could just about make out the prehistoric burial chambers carved out of the rock: a series of shallow caves, each with a shelf inside that had been used to store a body. Dangerous looking staircases – also carved from pure rock – snaked up and along the cliffs. I had no desire to climb them.
Wooden torches lined the small shoreline. A couple of men began to light them. I could smell the petrol; the bundled rags at the end of each wooden stake had already been doused in fuel. Flames caught; light wavered; the sea lapped gently against the rocks.
Those at the front of the group, nearest the shore, got down on their knees facing the water. The rest of us followed suit; a weird Mexican Wave of kneeling people.
“It won’t be long,” someone whispered in heavily-accented English. “They’ll know we’re here. They always do.”
Then, once again, silence descended.
The advance group was spotted several minutes later – a large luminous blanket floating in the shallows, heading purposefully towards the shore. I watched in a kind of numbed awe as the initial shoal came out of the sea and flopped onto the sand. They seemed to possess the rudimentary shape of humans but they were gelatinous, squashy and boneless, like jellyfish. What had been graceful in the water was clumsy on dry land: they flapped and writhed across the sand, limbs twitching, sightless faces turned moonward. Camera flashes flared, breaths were held, eyes widened. More things emerged from the sea to join the others. Soon nine or ten of them had come ashore.
“Sin espinas,” someone whispered.
“They’re beautiful,” said Tina, and for a moment I thought she was joking. But when I looked at her, I could see her eyes reflecting the flames. She was mesmerised by these things; she couldn’t look away, even if she wanted to. And clearly she didn’t.
The things squirmed closer, and then they paused in their movement, raising their rubbery arms up towards the sky. Each one turned up its jellied face and looked into the star-strung blackness, opening its mouth as if to scream, or perhaps to relay a silent summons to whatever was up there, waiting to be called.
Fear gripped me but I had no idea why.
I reached out to take Tina’s limp hand, but she turned to me, smiled, and shook her head, slipping her soft, cold fingers out of my palm.
“I’m sorry. I have to go.”
It was the last thing she ever said to me, so quietly that I could barely make out the words. Her voice was so inconsequential, so insufficient. It was not much of a note on which to end a twenty-year marriage.
“Don’t go.” But it was already too late; it was much too late, because she’d already left me. I’d known for months that whatever we had once shared was over. We were both simply waiting for the right moment to admit the truth. When we’d made love the night before, it had felt like goodbye. I didn’t want to admit it at the time, but right then I had no choice. All truth was revealed: a light shone into my depths and I felt empty.
As Tina stood and slowly made her way through the kneeling onlookers towards the night surf, a respectful round of applause started up. There were no words, just this soft clapping – a polite appreciation of what she was doing. I joined in, unable to do anything else. I still don’t know why I didn’t go after her, drag her back up that steep pathway to the car, and drive us both away. It crossed my mind – of course it did – but for some reason the actions seemed inappropriate, as if I might offend something bigger and much more important than my own earthly needs and desires.
It was at that point I noticed the barman among the onlookers. He smiled sadly. I held his gaze for a moment and then looked away, back towards my wife.
Tina had shed her clothes as she approached the water. Her skin shone in the darkness, supplying its own luminescence. The unsteady things on the shore managed to turn themselves around and follow her back into the sea, as if she had always been the one to lead them.
Twisting at the waist, she looked back at me one final time and smiled. But I couldn’t read the smile at all: it was one I’d never seen before, weak and tragic and entirely inscrutable.
I tried to call out to her but whatever had a hold on me wouldn’t let me speak. I continued slow-clapping, hating myself for allowing my actions to be dictated by another, unseen, consciousness.
The last I saw of Tina was her long, pale back arching in the moonlight as she dived beneath the grey waves, and then she was gone. Even the ripples vanished quickly. I tried to remember her face but all I could picture was the way she parted her hair, the smudged shadows under her eyes, the way she turned away from me, shaking her head, whenever I said something stupid.
I was the last one to leave the beach that night.
People patted me on the shoulder, ruffled my hair, or simply paused for a moment to look down at me before they left. One or two of them even took my photograph.
When finally I was alone, I stood up and walked down to the shoreline and stood on the rocks looking outward. The sea was dark and quiet. The caves above and around me held more than the weighted darkness of ancient pre-history. The last vestige of some older force was stirring, possibly even waking.
After what seemed like aeons, I turned around and walked away from the shore, knowing that I would never come back here, to this hidden beach, or even to this beautiful island, where once I’d been close to happiness with the woman I loved.
Come morning, when Tina’s rubbery bones washed up on the shore or were deposited like lifeless anemone in a series of shallow rock pools by the retreating tide, I would be long gone. Let them be gathered up by strangers and taken to whatever museum was used to house such artefacts. I needed no memento or keepsake of this ridiculous night-time ritual. I knew even then it was simply the beginning of something greater; the first throes of a cosmic convulsion that would tear the world apart. But the truth was that Tina had already abandoned me a long time ago. Everything else was just the aftermath.
By the time I reached the car, whatever strange hold the beach seemed to have on me had dissipated. I climbed inside the vehicle, lowered my forehead to the steering wheel, and wept.
This memory would be all I had left to comfort me during the many bad times ahead: the soft touch of an already jelly-like hand, a weak smile in the darkness, white skin sinking beneath dark waters, the sound of the sea gently lapping at the time-smoothed rocks…
Wherever she is now, and whatever she has become, I pray that Tina knows I still love her. I always will.
***
Gary McMahon lives, works, rants and rages in Yorkshire, where he trains in Shotokan karate in preparation for the coming apocalypse and cycles up and down the Yorkshire hills in search of story ideas. ‘Necropolis Beach’ was inspired by a family holiday to Menorca: the secret beach and the burial caves are real, but whatever swims ashore there is purely fictional. Hopefully.